What It’s About

A precursor to Star Maker – it’s interesting, and entirely about the evolution of the cosmos at the nebula stage. Stapledon is the unrivaled master of slipping the reader into some sort of cosmic point of view in an entirely beautiful way.

After reading this book and a few others by him, I think I’ve discovered the method, to wit (and very roughly):

1. Protagonist starts in an ordinary situation
2. Protagonist is suddenly thrown into some very different situation, i.e. became one with a tree, or watching God at the moment of creation or the moment of the big bang
3. Posits some multistep process of how that happened
4. Explains the later steps in the process very well, so well in fact that you don’t notice he doesn’t explain the early steps at all.

Star Maker is much better, and if you can only read one, read that one. Nebula Maker was interesting though – essentially it is a small part of Star Maker – God creates the universe and the first step (after the big bang) is the formation of the nebulas who attain consciousness and awareness of each other. Religion, war and decay all follow – at some point decaying into stars, planets and people.

It introduced the concept of Glad Beholding as a religious goal which struck me as very deep in a way I can’t define yet.

How I Discovered It

The Amazon Kindle algorithm

What I Liked About It

Stapledon is just great in so many ways, he is able to write about big topics in a dramatic way like no other.

What I Didn’t Like About It

The organization left a bit to be desired, and the vocabulary was a bit much – without the Kindle word definitions I would have been very lost

Who Would Like It?

People who like Star Maker

Quotes and Highlights

By abstracting the personalities of the creatures Stapledon succeeds in making them appear stranger and more remote than could any detailed description, and the change in concept of the work required that many more recognizably “human” societies be pictured, societies with which a human reader can more easily identify. In addition, by creating a detailed history for these creatures, Stapledon originally made them appear almost human and accessible, a concept which he eventually abandoned. However, he did make use of some of the physical descriptions in the final plan.

The nebulae are devoid of senses familiar to human beings, suffer under no economic constraints, and have not been shaped by evolutionary pressures.

These personalities are Bright Heart and Fire Bolt. They represent, respectively, aspects of human personality Stapledon considered to be the most significant in human history, the Saint and the Revolutionary.

I have seen God creating the cosmos, watching its growth, and finally destroying it. Call me, if you will, a liar or a madman. Say I lack humor, say that my claim is sacrilegious and in the worst taste. Yet I have indeed seen God. I have seen him creating, watching, destroying.

The apparition, taken at its face value, violated the whole teaching of modern science. I know not whether I was more distressed at my derangement, or shocked at the devastatingly bad taste of the hallucination which confronted me, or tickled by the thought of the discomfiture which our scientists would suffer were it after all proved a true perception.

“It is God, it is God,” I said to myself. But I knew that if indeed there is a God he is no more visible than the theory of relativity.

Now at last I was to behold God’s latest creation. I was to attend the birth of that intricate and tragic cosmos, fashioned of nebulae and stars, in which mankind occurs.

Beneath God’s face the innumerable, shadowy, restless creative hands aimlessly fingered the pale glimmer which I knew was chaos, the formless potentiality of matter, the sleeping potentiality of mind. It seemed that in the dark spirit which is God there was not peace but restlessness, and the insistent need to create.

God gazed long upon his creature. And he smiled. And all his hands were still. Then God spoke to the dark and slumbering germ of the cosmos. And he said, “Let there be light.”

In answer to God’s command, the atom-cosmos had burgeoned not only with light but with a space and time peculiar to itself. And I, by some means or other, had gained a footing therein; but without ceasing to participate in the space and time peculiar to God.

There now came to me a vivid and terrifying realization that between me and the human world which was my true concern there lay aeon upon aeon of cosmical history, and nearly all of it inhuman. “Oh God,” I cried, “let me be again among my own kind. Blot out from my mind the memory of all this irrelevance. Let me play out my little past oblivious of the immensities. Let me take up once more the threads of a life distressed, bewildered, futile, but my own. Let me watch the spectacle of my own world. Futile it may be, tragic it is, but I am shaped for it. And in it there are little creatures like myself whose lives intertwine with mine.” Thus I prayed. But then I remembered the thing that God was, and I knew that it was useless to pray to him; useless, and also, in some manner which I could not comprehend, base. With a heavy heart I settled myself to the task of watching the bleak and intricate unfolding of the physical cosmos, not as yet feeling its perfection, not as yet realizing that some insight into these remote events was needed to prepare me for insight into the passionate themes which were to follow.

These undulations, these ubiquitous light rays, were actually visible to me. Seemingly they were for me illuminated by that other, swifter, more searching and more revealing light, which cast by the lucent person of God himself, pervades and drenches all things.

Each feathery ball, I noticed, was slowly shrinking. And as it shrank, it whirled more rapidly. And as it whirled, it was flattened. And as the flattening continued, there appeared in the center a bright and swollen core. The outer parts of the nebula were flung by their own movement far out into space; but seemingly the tugging core still kept a hold on them, so that they developed into an attenuated disc around the heart of the nebula, and were torn into streamers and spreading convolutions. So might a dancer, pirouetting, halo her bright head with far-flung, tangled whirls.

Could these lifelike creatures, I asked myself, be mere vortices of radiant gas? But I reminded myself that the briefest of the movements which I now witnessed must in fact occupy millions of terrestrial years, and that this impression of vital activity was an illusion. Age upon age must pass, I knew, before these clouds would condense into stars, and further ages before the rare meetings of stars should produce habitable worlds.

The living nebula has no need to gather energy from the world outside its own substance. Its font of power lies in the very matter which is its flesh. Its hunting ground and its prey are within its own intestines. It feeds upon its own secretion. For the primal beings within it provide by their myriadfold ejaculations a lavish source of power.

Since they have no need to seek food abroad or to avoid being preyed upon, none of the young nebulae save those significant few which grow up in enduring groups, develop organs of external sense. For the lone nebula, experience is entirely of events within its own body. But of those internal events it develops a very poignant and subtle awareness. It has an urgent need to be sensitive to the fluctuations of its internal energies, so that it may control and organize their expression and prevent them from damaging its tissues.

Since a nebula is so large that the cosmical light takes many thousands of years to travel across it, its nerve currents, though moving at the speed of light, are in a sense very sluggish. The whole tempo of nebular life is therefore, from the human point of view, fantastically slow. Passages of thought which a human brain would perform in a few seconds would take the huge nebular brain many years.

To understand the mentality of the nebulae, one must bear in mind three facts which make them differ through and through from human beings. They do not succeed one another in generations; they are not constrained by economic necessity; the great majority of them have reached maturity in ignorance of other minds. On Earth, the individuals of a race procreate and die, handing on the torch of evolution and of tradition to their successors. But with the nebulae there is no distinction between the growth of individuals and the evolution of the race. The life and memory of each nebula reaches back to the racial dawn. The race consists of the original host of individuals that condensed more or less contemporaneously after the explosion of the atom-cosmos. When the last of these dies, the race dies with it.

Another important consequence of the absence of generations is this. The nebulae are in a sense “nearer to God” than any man can ever be. The human child, in spite of our great poet, trails but dim and tattered clouds of glory. He embarks upon life, not fresh from God’s making fingers, but warped by the misfortunes and blunders of countless ancestors; and, no sooner is he born, than he entangles himself further by learning from the example of his elders. But the nebulae wake with the divine lust keen and unconfused within them, and they pursue it untrammeled either by errant instinct or by perverse tradition. Never need they suffer from mistakes not their own, or be led astray by the half-truths of teachers whose very obscurity lends them a baneful prestige. Thus the nebulae, at least in their youthful phase, have been able on the whole to follow the light within them with a steadier will than man, though with less diversity of expression.

Not till the last phase of the nebular drama did they discover the inexorable decay and annihilation which plays so great a part in all human experience.

As terrestrial animals delight in hunting and feasting and fighting, so the young nebulae delight to conquer and tame the fury of radiation within their dense cores.

Yet an extremely complex inner life has combined with freedom from economic servitude to foster in them a kind of self-consciousness peculiar to themselves. They had no opportunity of distinguishing between “I” and “you”; but they had constant need of distinguishing between “I” and the many opposed and often rebellious processes and cravings at work within them. Though normally they could never conceive the possibility of an “ego” or a “stream of consciousness” other than their own, they thoroughly grasped the difference between the lowly and the lofty within themselves.

But in the young nebula this sense of impending revelation was not fleeting and occasional but an enduring state that dominated the whole behavior.

By its veiled creative symbolism this art, as I have said, can raise the nebular spirit to the highest reaches of religious ecstasy. In the social nebulae the dance life is of course socialized and pregnant with all manner of social symbolism. In the solitary nebulae its aim is simply the perfection of self-expression.

For the lone nebulae, being exempt from external influences, attained a perfection of physical form which was ever a source of wonder to the social nebulae. The captured solitary would of course prove quite incapable even of realizing that the shocking distortions and agonies which now beset him were caused by the efforts of other minds to communicate with him. It would very soon appear to the social nebulae that, for all his physical perfection and symmetry, the foreigner was but an abject savage, unable to appreciate the beauties of group life, and incapable even of intelligent intercourse; in fact, that he was a mere brute, physically superb, but blind, deaf, and incredibly stupid. For to the excited and babbling observers he offered no hint of the strange solipsistic intelligence and will at work within him.

Very few groups attained this perfection. Most were either too closely or too loosely knit. In the former the individual spirit was stifled by the proximity of his neighbors. He was a mere herd member, with no inner being. And because society was composed of barren individuals, social life was barren also. The dance pattern of the group was, so to speak, geometrical and fatuous. In the too loosely knit groups, on the other hand, there was no willed community at all, but only a grudging contract by which all engaged to refrain from interference with their neighbors, so as to secure the maximum freedom of individual behavior.

In some groups I found two parties identical in disposition and policy in all respects save that each considered that itself should rule and the other be a subject race. In some others, one party, through long subjection, had lost the power of independent choice and had become inherently servile. In extreme cases the subject race was so debased that they were mere cattle under the control of the master race. And often the masters themselves were by now so modified in actual physical constitution that, had their slaves deserted them, they would have been undone; for little by little they had come to effect a style of athleticism and even a physiological habit which would have broken down completely if menial service had ceased to be available. Their dance measures were so difficult, their bodily constitution and mental operations so subtle and precarious, that they needed constant assistance from the simpler, tougher, and automatically loyal “cattle” attendant on them.

In most nebular societies, at one time or other in their career, conflict between opposed parties would flare up into actual warfare. One side would seek to overcome the other either by bombarding their most vulnerable organs with concentrated radiation, or by actually grappling with them and striving to tear them into fragments. It is difficult to give any idea of the horror with which I observed these battles. Superficially the spectacle was nothing but a confused tempest of whirling gas clouds in the depths of space; but to me, who had by now learned the emotional significance of all these changing shapes, to me who moreover could experience at first hand the agony of these torn tresses and shattered cores, the spectacle was no less nerve-racking than the sight of human bodies dismembered by shellfire.

The opposing forces would be precisely matched, each individual of one troop having a special opponent in the other. Though each warrior might on occasion fight any member of the enemy force, one particular enemy was his peculiar property, his “dear enemy.” In combat with this individual he not only rose to the extreme of fury or cold hate, but also he attained a unique exaltation which might almost as well be called love as hate, since it included, along with the lust to destroy, a chivalrous and passionate admiration of the foe. This strange movement of the spirit was accompanied at its height by a violent physical orgasm which ejaculated a murderous flood of radiation into the body of the enemy and reduced the subject himself to exhaustion.

The second respect in which nebular militarism differed from our own was this. The nebulae, since they could not propagate their kind, could not rely on an inexhaustible supply of the raw material of slaughter. The average group had only a few hundred members. It was impossible, therefore, not to regret the killing of an enemy, since, once killed, he could never be killed again. It was even regrettable that an enemy should ever be permanently maimed, since as a cripple he could never again be a worthy foe.

The martial groups were not typical of the social life of the nebulae. They were definitely freaks, whose strange perversion was due to peculiarities in their early history. But though rare, and seemingly doomed to self-destruction, these perverts were to play an important and a baleful part in nebular history.

But this rejoicing concluded only the first and local phase of the First Cosmical War.

It would be tedious and unnecessarily harrowing to describe in detail this darkest age of nebular history. Everywhere I “heard” familiar cries, though in nonhuman speech. “Civilization in danger! The war to end war! Wars will never end; you cannot change nebular nature. Reduction of armaments is impracticable. Peace, with security.”

Thus it was that the nebulae, though beings who were by nature exempt from economic necessity, were trapped into the lust of a power which was useless to them save for mutual destruction. Could anything, I asked myself, be more mad, more barren, more tragically incompetent than this trumped-up greed and mutual fear? But then I remembered my own world.

The struggle became desperate. The weaker was mangled into insanity. The stronger floated off in proud but guilty self-absorption, seeking in vain to return into solipsistic bliss. Eventually he was butchered for ammunition.

To this Bright Heart replied, “No one is past saving. The underlying principle of glad beholding is in each one of us, striving for expression. That great principle, that spirit which conceived the cosmos, demands that all shall participate.”

When he was at the point of death he cried out, “Look! Look! The great Maker who made all nebulae in his likeness watches us from outside the world. His heart is bright. His tresses can brace the cosmos.” I, myself, half expecting to see a divine eternal nebula beyond the hosts of mortal nebula, looked. It was a strange shock to me to see, peering through the veil of innumerable nebulae, the almost human face of God, remote, inscrutable, intent, kindled (as it seemed to me) to ecstasy by the creatures of his own artistry.

Moreover a strange “crumbling disease” was beginning to attack him, a disease increasingly common among the minute “satellite” nebulae, and by now not wholly unknown among the normal nebulae.

Fire Bolt, in fact, was growing old. He was beginning to pass over from being a nebula to being a globular cluster of stars, a minute galaxy. But inwardly he was still almost his old ardent self, though tired, utterly tired.

Surely it was a supreme duty to organize a worldwide mission to the lone nebulae, so as to emancipate them from their solipsistic prison cells, and kindle them with the gospel of community, and the holy zest of the cosmical dance.

The advocates of mechanical power argued that although a few lone nebulae might, with infinite trouble, be educated to take a humble part in the cosmical dance, the great majority were clearly too far gone in solipsism to appreciate the beauty of communal life.

Throughout the nebular era two slow but irresistible changes, independent but interacting, were setting a limit to the life of any possible cosmical community of nebulae, and to the lives of individual nebulae also. The first of these was the continued expansion of the cosmos, the second was the senescence of the individual nebulae.

For by now the “crumbling disease” which had destroyed Fire Bolt was a widespread plague, especially among the social nebulae, whose more active life seems to have worn them out more rapidly than the solitaries.

A strange passion of loneliness seized me. Like a prisoner I could have battered on the walls of the cosmos, had there been any walls. But I was imprisoned in a boundless finitude. Around me the dust of a dead world stagnated in the ether.

In addition to inspiring or influencing writers such as Brian Aldiss, Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem, Stapledon’s work gave the field such enduring tropes as hive minds, Dyson spheres, genetic engineering and terraforming. It is arguable that only H. G. Wells has made a more significant contribution to the field. Olaf Stapledon died in 1950.